Time Litter! Did Time Travelers Leave Time Garbage Back In Ancient Times?

Time travel: is it possible? What are its practical purposes? When will it be achievable? Will time travelers wear easily lose-able finger watches which they’ll haphazardly scatter across the time-scape? All of these questions and more run through my head every day. Be glad you’re not in my head.

Most of the time archaeology stories are limited to people having to stop work at a construction site because they found a dinosaur face under a parking lot. The rest of the time it’s being glamorized by Hollywood as the playground of swashbuckling, whip toting University Professors. But a discovery made in Shangsi, China has uncovered something that could change our very understanding of space and time! Or some guy just lost his watch a while ago.

Time travelers may have very tiny wrists. Or it’s a ring.

Apparently this story surfaced a few years ago but has continued to pop back up on the radar from time to time as evidenced by this Techeblog post from just a couple days ago. So as the story goes, archaeologists (who just happened to be traveling with a documentary crew and a pair of reporters, entirely co-incidentally), who believed they were the first linearly traveling visitors to a Ming dynasty Shangsi grave discovered what appears to be a 100-year-old Swiss watch among the undisturbed remains.

So, the first question on everyone’s lips was an obvious one: Do we really need ANOTHER Ming dynasty archaeological documentary?

The second question might be: how does a 100 year old watch wind up in a tomb, thought undisturbed for at least 400 years? Well, obviously the only answer is time traveling archaeologists, having seen this future award winning documentary on the amazing archaeological significance of the Shangsi tombs, traveled back to 400 years and two weeks ago, took what ever the documentarians discovered and somehow clumsily, (as time travelers often are) lost his heirloom ring watch in the tomb. This of course has caused an alternate timeline in which the new documentary will NOT find the thing that the time traveling archaeologist stole, which is why it’s TECHNICALLY not a paradox, but regardless, it has drastically changed all future events since that point.

Here you can see the archaeologists in this image fading from existence due to the actions taken at the 1955 Enchantment Under the Sea dance.

Or, you know, a hundred something years ago somebody already raided the tomb and between them being careful (aside from the loss of their time piece) and with the natural weathering of time, these latest tomb visitors just couldn’t tell they weren’t the first ones there.

NAH! Time travel. That’s the more obvious answer. Time travel, guys. Time travel.